Turning Virtue into Vice
by unicornhime
Summary: Edward Cullen was hunting for redemption." A Dark!Edward character study in the years after he was turned. One-shot.


_AN: So I got recruited into Livejournal's twilight_t00bs, and this was my contribution. Not much to say about it other than I found this stuff fascinating when we were discussing it in my capstone class lately. Interesting stuff, the ideas of virtue and vice. I do wish this could have been a bit longer, but I ran out of time. I hope you enjoy it anyway. _

_Disclaimer: Characters belong to Stephenie Meyer, no copyright infringement intended. _

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_Vice can never know itself and virtue, but virtue knows both itself and vice._

_-Plato_

Edward Cullen was hunting for redemption.

He'd been hunting since the day he woke up, bloodthirsty and dangerous, confused and afraid, as his world of black and white exploded into bleeding color.

He hadn't known what to make of it all. The last thing he had remembered was watching the nurse change the sheets on his mother's now-vacant cot beside him. Dr. Cullen dismissed the nurse with a grave expression.

"I'm going to take care of you, son," he said to the fever-stricken boy, a strange resolution in his voice. Edward only worried about breathing in and out as the doctor wheeled his cot away.

Then, there was pain. Excruciating, blinding, burning, torturous pain. It gripped his very soul, strangling the life out of him.

Then, there was nothing.

His mind was astonishingly clear. It was raining that night, one of those fierce Midwestern storms that cracked the sky open with deafening thunder and blinding lightening, rain pelting against the glass windows. He could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock down the hall and the splashes of a dog playing in the puddles down the street. He could see colors he hadn't know existed and trace the veins in the woodwork of the bedframe with unnerving precision. He could smell the muskiness of a house that had been cooped up for too many days and the crisp air washed clean by the storm.

But he could not understand what had happened to him. As Dr. Cullen – Carlisle, as he came to know him – explained to him what he had become, he couldn't believe what had happened to him. He became a stranger in a strange land, clinging to what he thought he knew.

As a human, he'd been like any other teenaged boy. Good-natured, but unendingly curious with an insatiable thirst for knowledge.

Now he thirsted for something else entirely.

Girls said he was attractive and fought for his attentions, but he was too distracted by his books and magazines and glamorous stories of war to notice. He was remarkably down-to-earth for someone as intelligent as he was. His mother drilled into him the rules and ethics of gentlemanly behavior, of humility and grace. On his own, he waited for the days to crawl by until he was old enough to enlist, and he studied diligently. Politics, philosophy, technology, anything that might give him an edge on his path to becoming a war-hero.

His latest are of study was Plato and his philosophy on virtue. Edward was fascinated with the idea that virtue and vice were one and the same, one was simply a distortion or perversion of the other. That one could take a virtue too far and it would become a vice.

His mother encourage his studying, hoping that he would find something in his books that would show him the horror of war, that her little boy would not run off, searching for glory that didn't exist.

His father grew sicker with each passing day.

Edward loved his parents and helped as much as he could, but there was nothing more he could do for his father but pray - pray that his father would regain his strength and pray that Edward could get his taste of war.

Now, though, he was faced with a completely different war, one he did not understand. And so he was afraid.

Nothing in his books had prepared him for this, but he had Carlisle to guide him. That first night, the air had been so clean, his throat so scorched, the opportunity so perfect that he acted on pure instinct, tearing out of the house like a demon out of hell. He didn't even know what he was doing until there was a corpse was broken in front of him, the rain already washing all traces of his sin away.

"There is another way," Carlisle said gently, standing behind Edward in the rain. "A way to survive and still maintain your humanity." Stricken, Edward followed him out of the city, where Carlisle showed him how to hunt like a man and not like a monster.

Thus began Edward's life as a vegetarian who drank blood as well as a series of discussion with his mentor about redemption and goodness and humanity.

"We are the opposite of humanity," Edward argued. "We take life without giving back. You cannot say that we still possess our souls."

"I give back by my position as a doctor. I can help my patients in ways that other doctors cannot. You are searching for ways to overcome temptation. Isn't that goodness? Isn't goodness a symptom of a soul?"

"But it is fighting what we have become. It is going against my instincts. It's not ireal/i."

"What is real? Goodness is truth. iTruth/i is truth, no matter how you find it."

"You can't get at truth through a lie!" Edward exclaimed passionately.

"Can't you?"

Carlisle looked at him intently, and frustrated, Edward stalked out of the room.

Years later, after Edward's eyes faded to gold, these debates continued. The two men formed an unbreakable bond, despite their differing opinions, and Edward followed Carlisle to Wisconsin, leaving the tangible memories of his childhood (the only kind he had left) behind.

It is there that Carlisle found another support in his earnest argument for the presence of his soul: love.

Carlisle and Esme were wed and happy. Edward was happy for his foster father's sake, but he was still restless.

He grew to love Esme, too, in a different way of course. She was overjoyed with the prospect of him as a son. She loved him the way he imagined his birth mother must have after the veil over his memories grew too thick. But her love triggered something inside him.

It was slow. Like the single key of a piano, beautiful until it is struck too many times in too rapid succession and it becomes nothing more than an irritating noise, meaningless and without beauty. Every time she praised him or showed affection towards him, though he knew she was sincere, he felt more and more undeserving. Unworthy, of both her praise and love.

Edward had been taught not to become too proud, that pride was the downfall of every great nation and empire – pride and arrogance and greed. This fact was backed up by book after reliable, trusty book. So he humbled himself to the point of loathing. He hated everything about himself, everything that distinguished him from a normal human. He hated his strength and his hunger, his hearing and his mental perceptiveness, his skin and his eyes.

Carlisle's way of living, no, icoping/i was no longer satisfactory. Why should he search for light in the dark? Why not search the dark itself? So he rebelled against all he knew in search of something better, taking to the streets as a destroying angel.

Now he crept alone, listening to the dark thoughts of his next meal – a creature unfit to be called a man. He hunted darkness and redemption, in a dark alley in the dark night, hating himself all the more for it.

And so his virtue had become his vice.


End file.
